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Youth are often thought of as the recipients of care, but many children and young adults also provide it — and since the COVID-19 pandemic, that’s become even more common.
Research on young caregivers is “incipient,” said Alejandra Letelier, one of four authors of a recent study of the well-being of this group in the United Kingdom. Still, it’s already clear that taking on caregiving responsibilities at an early age can impact the way children and young adults feel about their lives overall.
The researchers focused on young people between the ages of 10 and 25 who provided both primary and secondary care. They most commonly tended to their parents, Letelier said, though some were responsible for their grandparents or siblings.
The study — which used data from a longitudinal national health survey that ran from 2009 to 2023 — found young people experienced a dip in life satisfaction around the time they became caregivers. This was particularly acute for those who were Black, came from low-income households, or provided more than 10 hours of care per week.
Spotlight PA spoke with Letelier to learn more about the study and the challenges that young caregivers face. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Spotlight PA: Could you talk about how this study came about and why you decided to look into this issue?
Alejandra Letelier: The researchers who I work with, they were looking at care and carers before this project. Most of the research or most of the knowledge is based on older carers. They realized that there was this group of individuals that are young that are caring, and nobody were looking at them.
[Editor’s note: In the UK, caregivers are called carers, and caregiving is called caring.]
The relationship of caring, it's pretty natural when you are an adult. A big part of the population will be a parent, and then will take care of their parents, or things like that. But it's not so natural for a child to take care of an adult. So we cannot assume that the effect of caring is the same for an adult and a child.
Why do you think that it's important to look at the experiences of young caregivers specifically?
Being a young carer has different kinds of effects. Caring is not bad by itself, and it does have positive effects on carers, like some carers feel more empowered, more self-confident. But also, all the studies have shown that caring can have detrimental effects on young carers.
It has been seen that young carers can have worse … mental health, well-being. We also know, mainly by qualitative studies … that they might feel lonely, that big care loads can affect their relationships.
The decision to look at well-being and health came from conversations that we had been having with carers. They said that this had affected them in several ways, but one of the main ones was in their well-being, how they feel, and they felt that that hasn’t been recognized.
In those conversations that you had with caregivers, what kind of challenges did you find that young caregivers are facing?
Relationships. We have seen effects on education as well.
They choose a university that is closer to home. There are effects on access to employment. There are challenges in well-being and health. In every aspect of life, you could see that there is an effect.
In most cases, it's also related with the amount of care. We are not against anybody being involved in caring. It’s just the amount of care needs to be the proper one for that age.
What were some of the major takeaways from your study?
The thing with this study is that we look at trajectories. This is not a static process. In most cases, this is something that takes time, and somebody, most probably a child, will involve themself in caring tasks, but that doesn't mean that immediately they will identify themselves as a young carer. The good thing with this data is that we could look 10 years before and 10 years after. In well-being, we look at life satisfaction, self-esteem, and for health, we look at self-rated health.
For all young people, life satisfaction declines over the years — but there is a significant difference for young carers and non-carers, with young carers reporting lower life satisfaction than non-carers. But this difference begins two years before somebody identifies themselves as a carer, and remains for three years after.
This is … telling us that we need to identify these individuals earlier in order to be able to prevent this detrimental effect, and to acknowledge that this is not an effect that comes and goes. It has a long-term effect.
We found that those carers that were caring for longer hours — for 10 or more hours per week — had even lower life satisfaction. And we also find further inequalities by household income.
What do you think was the most surprising finding?
We only find [a difference in] life satisfaction. We didn't find this with self-rated health or self-esteem. With health, we weren’t expecting to find much … But I thought we [would] find the same [pattern] in life satisfaction and self-esteem. And we didn't. This is just telling us that not every aspect of well-being is affected — just some.
Another unexpected finding … we also look at gender differences. With older carers, you almost always find that women are more involved in caring than men. But with these younger populations, you don't see a gender difference, and that wasn’t expected, but it's something that is consistent in young carers — not only in the UK, also in other places.
We did find a gender difference by care intensity. So the same amount of boys and girls are involved in caring, but females are involved in more intense care, so they are caring for longer hours than males. I think that's interesting by itself.
What do you think that we can be doing for young caregivers as a society, or as people who individually know a young caregiver?
There are a lot of things that can be done by policies, but as individuals, I do think that the first thing is to identify and be aware of this population.
That means people at schools, teachers, social workers, or anybody that is working with young people, to be able to give the kind of support that these young people [need]. Lots of times young carers tell you that they need simple things — for example, in schools or at universities … they might … need longer times to do homework. So sometimes the measures are simple, but are daily.
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